everydaylife

On this date in 1839, the French government released Louis Daguerre’s photographic process to the world—for free. The inventor began developing the process with partner Nicéphore Niépce in the early 1830s; it involved securing a thin, silver-plated copper sheet within a camera obscura and exposing the plate to the fumes from iodine crystals, which created a layer of light-sensitive silver iodide. When the photographer removed the camera’s cover, the plate was exposed to light. In a darkroom, the plate would be developed with mercury fumes and fixed in a salt solution, creating a daguerreotype (Niépce died in 1833, so the process was named after Daguerre).

This process would be soon used around the world (except in England, where those who wanted to make daguerreotypes had to pay a hefty licensing fee; William Henry Fox Talbot, who created his photography process, called calotype, and patented it in 1841, would also sell licenses to use his method). Eventually, the daguerreotype process was replaced by the wet collodion process, but many photos—of political figures, of regular workers, of buildings and landmarks, of celestial bodies—would be frozen in time using Daguerre’s method. Here are a few of them. 

Southworth & Hawes, Unidentified Woman, ca. 1852

(Source: the wonderful Flickr of George Eastman House)

“The photograph is literally an emanation of the referent. From a real body, which was there, proceed radiations which ultimately touch me, who am here; the duration of the transmission is insignificant; the photograph of the missing being, as Sontag says, will touch me like the delayed rays of a star.”